The Proof is in the Prince!

Posted by Jim Henley on August 31, 2006 at 09:49 PM

More real roleplaying with real children. I'm getting to this later than I thought I would so I will recount the details as best I can.

The final stage of Princes' Kingdom character creation is "Proving Your Prince," analog of the Accomplishment phase of Dogs in the Vineyard. You tell the Guide what you'd like your Prince to have demonstrated to his teachers and his father, the King, before the Prince sets out on the big tour of the islands. There's a conflict, and if you win the conflict, what you wanted to prove becomes a new Strong (d8) trait, while if you lose you get a new, related Troublesome trait (d4 trait).

In a way the stakes are a little more intense than with a Dogs accomplishment. In Dogs, you're trying to gain a 1d6 trait and if you lose the accomplishment conflict, you still get a (related) 1d6 trait, just not the one you were going for. In the TPK variation, losing the Proof conflict causes a marginal hit in effectiveness, and there's the additional emotional issue, when playing with children, of "making do" with getting a Troublesome trait instead of a Strong one. When I was just a little younger than my son is now, I was still upending the chess board in fury when I lost to my dad.

So here as, I would discover, elsewhere in the game, the rules provide you one of those simultaneous risk/opportunity phenomena that essentially define parenting: dealing with frustration and either the risk or actuality of failure. As sometimes happens with bright kids, so much cognitive stuff comes easy to him that he has a tendency, when something does balk him, to want to bail on it right away.

I rolled really really well. My son rolled really really poorly.

My son decided he wanted to prove that his Prince "is a really good climber. I said, "How about, just before you all set sail, you're out with some friends by a really big tree and one of them starts teasing you, that even though you're a big deal Prince and all he bets you can't climb this tree." He agrees that this is a great way to set the scene.

I'm sitting there with great dice and my ten-year-old with crap. Right away he's afraid he's going to lose, and a little frustrated. "Take a look at your sheet," I suggest, "and see what traits you think you can use." None of them would work, he grumbles. Some of this is that withdrawal syndrome kicking in; but some of it is just not being familiar with manipulating the resources the game gives you. After a little discussion, he uses Prince Cheese's I Can Talk to Animals trait to get a large owl to fly him up to the first branch. He gets to roll a d8, which also comes up pretty crappy. If he's going to get anywhere he's going to need to call in more traits. (I think we've already got in "I'm a Prince" by this time.)

Hm. I say, looking at his sheet. What about "I'm squeamish about insects?"

"What good would that do?" he asks in more or less those words.

"Well, let's think. How could you use it?"

"I don't know."

"Give it some thought. I can imagine all sorts of ways."

"Like what?" Note of challenge.

Now here's the interesting and hard part about gaming, not just with kids, but with your kids. You may have, and I'm going out on a limb here, decided at some point that the power dynamic between GM and player is really vexed and really important. You may have, oh I don't know, concocted three or four complete if only vaguely compatible theories of roleplaying that consider this dynamic central to the game. And similarly, you may have decided, through long experience of being a parent or having one (or however many), that the power dynamic between parent and child is  really vexed and really important. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you may have noticed that, in the case of roleplaying with your children, both of those vexed power dynamics cut in the same direction.

Near as I can tell, parenting means accomplishing two things: 1. Convincing your child that other people are real; 2. Making sure that when you let go of the bike, they can keep pedaling.

Which is a long way of saying that, in this instance on this evening, I was very afraid of helping too much, but at the same time afraid of letting the bike fall over. I decided that, since this is a new activity for my son, it was okay to provide a fair amount of guidance, if couched as suggestions. Even though I had a real fear that what I'd really be teaching him is Make the GM give you cues and follow them obediently.

"What if," I said, "the owl is a wise owl, and knows that this climb will be hard for Prince Cheese, and since he knows Prince Cheese is afraid of bugs, you notice that the owl has set you on a branch that has a big beehive, and that gives you the energy to climb up away from it as quickly as possible?"

That idea he liked. So he got to roll his d4, and as I recall, it came up lousy, like all his other dice.

Much of the interpersonal level of the game Struggle was me cajoling my son into not assuming he had lost. I also suggested now and then - before and during the Struggle - that losing the Struggle wouldn't be bad; he'd still get a trait, and if we kept playing multiple sessions he'd lose lots of Struggles over time. It was hard. It was evening; his Ritalin had long since worn off; we were having late-vacation crash syndrome and the dice were sure as hell not helping. In the end, if the "Proving Your Prince" section of the rules hadn't omitted some of the details of how Reversing the Blow works he really would have lost. As it is, he took the blow a couple of times, ended up coming up with some nice details in some of his late narrations, and came out of it with the Good climber trait, growth fallout and long term fallout. He decided to name the Owl and take a Troublesome relationship with it; put a rip in his Prince's Cloak and - as a gift from his Father the King, I think - acquire a new Belonging, an Awesome (d8) unbreakable staff.

All of the fallout traits were his idea, including the troublesome relationship with the owl, which seemed really cool. The session was useful in helping him learn about the flexibility of traits and it helped him increase his attachment to Prince Cheese. I told him how proud I was that he stuck with it; how much I enjoyed the ideas he came up with for narrations; and how cool I thought he had made Prince Cheese through the whole process. I set my own long term goal of "Help him get to the point where he can take in-game setbacks gracefully."

When I said I would get work on an Island for us all to play, he said, "Ooh, I've got an idea!" and commenced telling me about an island in his Pokemon game. I let the wheels turn a couple days, and then had a version of it that would work for Princes' Kingdom, though that is a story for another time.

Next: The Proof Is in the Princess!